A bunch of converter recipes are always present if not deactivated

[sharky98]

See this example.

Without any output requested, it create the Sulfur (Iron) and Uranium Ore (Bauxite) recipes. If I disable them, new one pop up: Bauxite (Copper), Sulfur (Coal), Caterium Ore (Copper).

[nattthebear]

Thanks for reporting this. I was aware of it, which is why by default if you visit a fresh page, the converter recipes are not enabled. But I'm not quite sure what to do about it.

The optimizer tries to minimize natural resource consumption in terms of weighted points. But some recipes are actually a net gain in weighted points, so it will always use as much of them as possible (once any constraints have been satisfied). The way the optimization is set up, consuming and producing a resource have to be exact opposites of each other, so if consuming sulfur is "bad", then creating it must be "good" and that's not easily changed without adding special hacks.

Weighted points have always been a rough approximation; a way to quickly gauge recipes against each other and come up with some useful results. But they have their limitations. Blindly always using the best WP result will result in avoiding a lot of good recipes and leaving certain resources underutilized. You always have to consider next best alternatives and what else a resource would be used for. In that light, I think the converter conversion recipes are almost universally bad. SAM ore is the only way to handle certain high end syntheses, but the things that the conversion recipes enable always have alternate ways to do them.

For my personal usage, I just turned the conversion recipes off by default, and only turn them back on when I'm looking for specific options.

I didn't think anyone used this tool so I haven't thought much about the community at large. I posted it on Reddit once, but it didn't take off as there were many other similar tools already. I wanted to avoid having many complex settings to work through to use the optimizer, so even though there's a full LP solver under the hood it doesn't allow you to do things like customize weights. I think the best solution here would be customized weights that treat SAM ore as more valuable.

[sharky98]

Thanks for the answer! 👍🏼

I am trying a lot of tools because none seems to match how my mind want to analyze stuff. Yours is the closest I could find. Basically, I'm looking to have a way to set a target output and compare the manufacturing tree with (almost) all available recipes and get the ore cost, power needed and number of building. With your tool it's a simple matter of checking and unchecking the alternate recipes as needed.

Also, thanks for explaining how the solver works (as I understand, minimize/optimize resource consumption based on some weighted points). That explained why it tends to almost always prefer the plastic/rubber recipes (which I hates 😆).

[nattthebear]

compare the manufacturing tree with (almost) all available recipe

I've found myself doing this many times, and I do it the same way you do; mostly by just unchecking and rechecking various recipes. I thought about automating it in the tool, but you end up with an explosion of data and processing cost. There are too many combinations of different recipes to look at to show the user all of the results without having some strong criteria ahead of time (like weighted points).